CAIRO — Next to the U.S. embassy in Cairo is the longest continuous sit-in in Egypt — in support of Omar Abdel-Rahman, known as the "Blind Sheikh," who is currently serving a life sentence in North Carolina on charges of conspiring to commit terrorist attacks against the United States. The demonstration is no more than a slew of posters and three men — one of whom, a smiling man in an olive galabeya, is the blind Sheikh’s son, Abdullah Omar Abdel-Rahman.

While many Egyptians grudgingly support Obama over his Republican challenger, no endorsement is forthcoming from the blind sheikh’s son. "[Egyptians] think Obama is a sweet talker — but he puts poison in honey," he says. "Let us remember that it was during Obama’s time [in office] that Osama bin Laden was killed."

Obama’s efforts to tout the killing of the al Qaeda chief as his signature foreign policy accomplishment, evidently, did not go down well in this small corner of Cairo. To hear the son tell it, Americans should pull the lever for the candidate more likely to protect their lives from the Islamic community incensed at a litany of international outrages committed by the United States.

"A scholar has called for kidnapping Americans [to trade for Abdel-Rahman’s release], but we have always been peaceful," he says, smiling as he delivers the veiled threat. "But we can’t control the whole Arab world, and we want America to avoid such a thing from happening. But if it happened it would be Obama’s fault."

We’ll put him down as undecided.

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J. Dana StusterJ. Dana Stuster is an assistant editor at Foreign Policy. He has studied at the American University of Beirut and graduated in 2010 with degrees in English and International Relations from the University of California, Davis. Before coming to FP, his work appeared in the Atlantic and the National Interest, among other publications. | Passport |

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Shadi Hamid<p>
Shadi Hamid is
director of research at the Brookings Doha Center and a fellow at the Saban
Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. You can follow him
on Twitter: @shadihamid.
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